Damage from allegations ongoing, Court told
The owner of international adventure travel company World Expeditions told the NSW Supreme Court today of the damaging impact of the defamatory Four Corners program on one of his company’s leading representatives, Tim Macartney-Snape.
Nick Kostos, who regards Mr Macartney-Snape as among the finest trek leaders in the world, acknowledged that it was the climber’s association with Wilderness Expeditions that influenced his decision to buy the competing agency in 1992.
“Tim was a pre-eminent Australian mountaineer, in fact one of the pre-eminent mountaineers in the world, and if he was associated with our company it would be a tremendous competitive advantage,” he said.
The businessman went on to describe the negative effects the 1995 broadcast had on his colleague’s reputation and the complaints and cancellations that followed.
“My impression of the show was that Tim was a member of a cult and was brainwashing children,” Mr Kostos said. “We had clients ring up and complain that we were associated with Tim Macartney-Snape…asking why are we supporting someone who is in a cult.”
“After the program we had a cancellation rate that we have never experienced before…it was extremely difficult to attract people,” he said.
Mr Kostos said that “due to the controversy of the program, not only Four Corners but in the media generally” his company made a commercial decision to move the feature on Mr Macartney-Snape from page three to the back of its marketing brochure.
He went on to say how negative perceptions of Mr Macartney-Snape and the FHA were ongoing some 12 years after the broadcast, recounting that just two months ago he had been asked by an acquaintance whether Mr Macartney-Snape was “still involved with brainwashing children”.
During cross-examination, Mr Kostos said that after the broadcast he asked Mr Macartney-Snape if he was “a member of a cult” or “brainwashing children” and that the mountaineer had said “No”.
“I regard him as a person of high integrity and that was enough for me,” he said, adding, “I made a decision to support him no matter how many complaints we had.”
Taking the stand shortly before lunch, the FHA’s Chief Executive Officer Sam Belfield explained to the Court how he became interested in biologist Jeremy Griffith’s work after reading Beyond The Human Condition in 1993 while a rural science student at the University of New England.
He recounted how later that same year he attended an FHA Open Day in Sydney where Emeritus Professor Charles Birch, the Templeton Prize winning biologist, gave an address alongside Mr Griffith, one of the Professor’s former students from Sydney University.
An audio-visual recording of the Open Day showed Professor Birch giving his perspective on the “two huge themes” in Mr Griffith’s work, namely “the nature of the world” and “the nature of human nature”.
The Court saw footage of Professor Birch reflecting on the difficulties of the “mechanistic paradigm” of science and outlining how “science can’t deal with subjectivity…this is something that is very difficult to get your teeth into and yet it is the most important thing in the world”.
Evidence from Mr Belfield continues tomorrow in the Supreme Court.
